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I really dug Raven Tower and it's definitely a lot different from Leckie's other stuff if you've read any of that (Ancillary Justice, etc.). But, I also think that if you've liked her other stuff, it's worth checking out. I definitely agree that the second person works well, and I really enjoyed how the various magic/deities worked. I also just found out that apparently the plot is very loosely based on (maybe not really a spoiler but I'll tag it anyway) Hamlet of all things, which I'm surprised I didn't pick up on when I was reading it, but it makes sense in retrospect. I'm also realizing that I've read a good amount of stuff recently that used some second person narration (Raven Tower, Broken Earth Trilogy, Harrow the Ninth and some others I can't remember off hand), and I'm curious if it might more common now than it used to be? Granted, all the examples I'm thinking of used it in specific ways for specific reasons, and none of them used it exclusively, but I'd love to know other examples of books where it's used well since it can be pretty interesting when it's done well.
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Sep 9, 2020 03:48
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Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson is about a generation ship and is told from the POV of the ship's AI. It does mostly focus on a single generation (as they reach their destination and what happens there).
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Sep 10, 2020 22:47
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I just finished The Tyrant Baru Cormorant and I continue to love this series. I'd pre-ordered it and I ended up reading it back-to-back with Monster which I think was a good approach since the two are so closely entwined (and it made the part where Tau starts telling Baru the Story of Ash that had been going through both books all along a neat little reveal/beat for me, especially since I might not have caught it if I'd read the books farther apart). Really looking forward to reading the next one whenever it comes out, General.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:48
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SFL Archives posted:CODEX SERAPHINIANUS gets brought up a few times. Knowing nothing about it and refusing to google it, the CODEX SERAPHINIANUS sounds alot like the Voynich Manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript It's pretty close to the Voynich Manuscript (weird illustrations, unreadable fake language) but much newer and a lot less mysterious. It was written and illustrated by an Italian artist named Luigi Serafini and was published in 1981. It goes for a pretty penny these days since it basically never gets reprinted, and I'm still kicking myself that I didn't pick one up from my local used bookstore when they had a copy for about $90.
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Sep 12, 2020 03:57
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Baru 3 spoilers: There's also the fact that Iscend isn't the one who did the surgery, the Cancrioth took Abd and Iraji back on the ship do to it. And the surgeries were interrupted by Faham's raid on the ship, so even if everything had been going fine before then, that was probably when his spine was injured.
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Sep 18, 2020 23:21
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quantumfoam posted:<re-posted from off-site SFL Archives readthrough blog> Did you mean Flight of the Navigator here? (Unless it was released with a different title at some point?) I've just realized that that movie is probably a big part of what got me into sci-fi when I was a kid (beside endlessly re-watching the taped-off-tv Star Wars VHSs my parents made - there's a Lipton tea commercial still seared into my brain from those). It does seem like a lot of people my age (early 30s) or so have never even heard of it when I've mentioned it. But I probably wouldn't believe it if someone told me there was an 80s Disney movie where a kid gets kidnapped by NASA and then pilots a spaceship with a Pee-Wee Herman AI and a weird (but adorable) tiny pet shrimp-dog alien thing.
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Sep 26, 2020 17:55
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quantumfoam posted:I suspect it was 1986 SFLer's conflating Flight of the Navigator + the 1985 film Explorers into one film. I mention what people post in the SFL Archives, fact-checking all the bizarre-ness posted would have me much further back (literal years) in this readthrough project. That's really funny to me that they'd conflate the titles. I also definitely understand that you wouldn't have time to factcheck/correct things they messed up with how much content there is. (And I love reading these updates every time you post them.) Against my better judgement I looked up "My Living Doll" and oh boy it sure was the 60s back then: wikipedia posted:Bob's initial goal is to teach Rhoda (side note: she's a military-developed android) how to be a perfect woman, which he defines as one who "does what she's told" and "doesn't talk back." He also strives to keep her identity secret from the world.
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Sep 26, 2020 23:35
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Angrymog posted:Avoid Provenance though, which is a standalone set in a different part of the same universe. Incredibly boring and pointless. It's definitely not as good as the Ancillary trilogy but I didn't regret reading it, personally. I thought it was sort of a cozy/charming heist-y story, and I liked the worldbuilding (the culture(s) in it are totally different from the Radch). I think it's worth checking out if you REALLY dig the Radch books, but yeah, it's definitely not the same.
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Oct 12, 2020 13:31
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I think the biggest issue with roundup lists like that is the titles. Saying something like "Best Ever" is always going to be hyperbolic and pretty useless. That said, there's definitely some good stuff on the list, and it's interesting to me just how many of the picks are pretty new (published within the last 5, maybe 10 years or so?). Definitely got reminded of a few titles I've been considering checking out too.
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Oct 15, 2020 21:57
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Looks like Tor just announced a sequel/preorders for a sequel to Prosper's Demon called Inside Man. https://publishing.tor.com/insideman-kjparker/9781250786159/ I'm already planning to pick it up since I enjoyed Prosper's Demon, but it's the only K.J. Parker I've read so far. Is anything else he's written in the same vein/would also be worth checking out of I liked PD? (I know he's got a big back catalog, but I'm not that familiar with it and wouldn't know where to start.)
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Oct 26, 2020 23:43
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MockingQuantum posted:Are you looking for stuff with similar content or writing style? I don't know offhand if he has anything that's similar "subgenre" as Prosper's Demon, but Parker's writing style is pretty consistent, in my experience. I haven't read a ton of his stuff, but Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (which IIRC is the reason of the current thread title) and The Folding Knife are both very good. I think a big part of it for me was the worldbuilding around the demon(s) and especially the politicking and long-term planning/plotting stuff that lead to the conclusion. I also liked the writing style though, so if his stuff is generally pretty consistent I might take a look at Sixteen Ways and Folding Knife (I'm pretty sure I've seen those specific titles mentioned before too as being good ones.) Thanks for the response!
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Oct 27, 2020 00:42
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Darth Walrus posted:Has anyone ever done a good mecha novel? I know they're a highly visual sci-fi concept, but there must have been enough folks having a crack at the idea for some decent stuff to come out of it. There are a couple upcoming titles I know of that I'm keeping an eye out for because I really love mecha stories but would love for more non-anime options. Top of my looking-forward-to-it list is The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang (formerly wrote as JY Yang -- they wrote the Tensorate series of novellas). The basic pitch is 'Joan of Arc but queer and with giant robots.' It's not slated to be published until 2022 though. The other upcoming one (that I know of at least) is Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta, who I'm not as familiar with, but there's a good amount of plot synposes available since it's coming out June 2021. It's supposed to be YA with lesbian mech pilots/mech destroying soldiers from what I gather. There's also one mecha book I've read (a novella) which I could only recommend with A LOT of caveats because while I liked it, it's definitely not for everyone. It's Dreadnought by Gretchen Felker-Martin (it was published independently, but she just got picked up by Tor to publish her next horror novel, so don't let the Gumroad listing throw you off as far as quality at least). It's sort of like "what if Neon Genesis Evangelion dove even deeper into the hosed up mental states/circumstances of the characters and the system that forces them to pilot war machines?" ...so it's pretty bleak and there are content warnings for basically everything under the sun (and just to be clear, it's not Eva fanfic, but is definitely inspired by it). But if a story that's a very body-horror forward examination of how messed up it is to exploit mentally ill teen mech pilots sounds like your jam, it's there (and it's pay-what-you-want!). I know there are mech stories out there that don't all focus on lesbians, but at least all the ones I know of/am interested in seem to have that in common, ha.
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Oct 28, 2020 02:05
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Yeah her writing style/content is definitely not something I would recommend to most people. I didn't personally find it to be solely torture porn, but I also think that's a fair takeaway at the same time. I have a really high threshold for that kind of thing in fiction, at least when it's done with some degree of empathy, but it's not a happy book by any stretch of the imagination. As far as the NGE inspiration/homage aspects, I didn't think that took away from it, but it's definitely a matter of taste. (FWIW, I did happen to rewatch the original NGE series just a few months before I picked up Dreadnought, so it was pretty fresh in my head when I was reading the book. And I know Felker-Martin has been pretty up front about NGE being what she was playing off of with it, so it's not like it's a secret or anything.) It does look like the April Daniels book was published a few years earlier. I've never read her work, but other than using the same title and the fact that there are main characters who are trans women, I don't see too much else that's similar thematically, at least in the synopsis (but again, I haven't read it so maybe there's more there).
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Oct 28, 2020 03:59
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StrixNebulosa posted:Hey this is a great post and thank you for reccing Dreadnought, I bought it last night and I'm 65% through it now and it's the closest I've ever seen anyone get to Porpentine's writing but somehow even grosser and I love it. It wears its influences on its sleeve and blasts through them and everything is awful and I would love to read more takes on NGE but hosed up. I'm glad you liked it! I recently read Psycho Nymph Exile and I didn't expect to run into someone else who'd read both it and Dreadnought (and enjoyed them) anytime soon. Porpentine has such a fascinating approach to writing, too. If you liked Felker-Martin's writing and want something more medieval-horror-fantasy themed, I actually liked her book Ego Homini Lupus even more than Dreadnought. (The content/themes continue to be crushingly bleak of course, but the monster in it is really cool imo. If you'd want any content warnings beforehand I'm happy to provide.)
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Oct 28, 2020 19:32
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StrixNebulosa posted:I didn't really get into Psycho Nymph Exile - porpentine's best works are her interactive fiction, and if you haven't, PLEASE read Eczema Angel Orifice, almost anything in that collection is soul-shattering. It's on sale now for 2.50$ at itch.io and 5$ at steam. Ah yes, I have read some of Eczema Angel Orifice and played around with her hypertext stuff too! I loved her interactive stuff which was why I got Psycho Nymph in the first place hah. I'm not sure if I can summarize it well since the really interesting stuff is spoiler-rich, but... Ego Homini Lupus is about the daughter of a 12th-century English lord who basically sells her off to be married to a destitute knight and work as his servant as much as his wife. He hunts wolves to pay his tax to the king and makes her skin and process the pelts by herself. There's a monster that lives in the woods nearby with connections to the knight, his dead brother and his horrible sister-in-law. There's also plenty of creepy bone magic involved (circles of bones, chapels of bones, lots of bones!), a feral bastard daughter who lives with them when she isn't eating bugs in the woods, and lots of self-loathing. The monster and magic really pick up in (from what I remember) the second half or so of the book. So very different from Dreadnought as far as setting, but still a lot of interesting body horror. I hadn't heard of Wolfhound Century before but that description and some others I'm seeing definitely have my attention. I might need to add that to my TBR.
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Oct 28, 2020 20:03
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Oh wow, I got curious and I just took a look at the 40 or so SFF books I've read this year and maybe only about 4 of them were written by cishet men? Mostly new titles but a good amount of older stuff too (I finally read some Ursula K. Le Guin after meaning to for a few years now).
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Nov 16, 2020 20:26
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ToxicFrog posted:I actually find Goodreads pretty useful, because if I'm googling a book the main things I want to know are: It's still in beta and so currently unfinished, but I've really been enjoying StoryGraph. (Might not be exactly what you're looking for but right now it seems like the most viable GR alternative in general at the moment.) They have a lot of, if not the exact same the same book metadata that Goodreads will have. But since it's in beta, they're pretty open to implementing new features as people are requesting them. I also love that it shows breakdowns of your reading stats (it's sort of the main point, hence the name) so you can see charts and graphs of stuff like how much you've read in a given time period, what genres and "moods" you tend to read, etc. And they're adding more features almost weekly.
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Nov 18, 2020 22:09
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ToxicFrog posted:Yeah, I have zero interest in using a book tracker, I already have my own, offline one that I like more. I didn't realize storygraph also had useful metadata, the stuff I heard about it before made it sound like it was strictly a recommendation engine and book journaling site. Recommendations are definitely one of the main things it does (and it does them A LOT better than GR and it's only getting better as more users join/add to the data pool), but yeah, at least right now it's mostly tracking and recommendations. You can get pretty in the weeds sorting your recommendations with things like page length, story pace, genre, etc. and they just keep adding more stuff you can sort by as time goes on. While they do pull some of the more subjective aspects of the book sorting (like moods and pace) from user input, they actually really de-emphasize reviews and are explicitly not trying to be a social/ratings site like Goodreads, which I can appreciate (for example, star ratings are displayed at the very bottom of each book entry and to even see reviews you have to expand out a collapsed-by-default section). I think it's worth keeping an eye on as they keep adding to it in the future, but yeah, if you've already got your own system it's probably not worth ditching that for unless you really like what they're doing currently.
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Nov 19, 2020 01:36
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Ben Nevis posted:Finna by Nino Cipri - When a wormhole opens in Not-Ikea and sucks in a grandmother, the two newest hires are designated to enter and recover the old woman or her nearest alternate world approximation. Only, they've recently broken up. So they navigate various alternate Ikeas, many quite hostile, trying to save the day and reconcile their relationship. I enjoyed this one. Quick, light, appropriately critical of capitalism and to some extent Ikea. Finna was definitely a fun little read. The sequel, Defekt, is supposed to be coming out in April and it follows one of the other employees having to search the store for defective merchandise (with the help of his possible clones/copies?).
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Nov 22, 2020 20:23
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Martha Wells just won a French SFF prize (the Prix Julia Verlanger), so I've now learned that the title for Murderbot Diaries in French is Journal d'un AssaSynth and I'm delighted.
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Nov 26, 2020 14:16
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StrixNebulosa posted:I finished Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey - and it made me very angry. Oh boy, I read a handful of Pern books when I was in middle school including this one (the only other ones my middle school library had were some of the Harper Hall of Pern books). I'd definitely mostly blocked the horrible 'romance' out of my memory but I remember thinking it seemed pretty weird or off even when I was like, 11 or 12. It was definitely the worldbuilding more than the character arcs that kept me reading them. And dragons. Actually, it was probably mostly the dragons. I also remember one of the Pern books to be the first time that something just viscerally threw me out of a story because of how unexpected/tone-breaking it was to me. I don't remember the exact book but there's a part toward the beginning of it where the characters find a (spoiler I guess?) computer that explains what the Thread is. Nothing in the books I'd read before that made it seem like the setting was anything other than fantasy-medieval-ish, so it came across as very 
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Nov 28, 2020 04:13
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Oh yeah, I definitely appreciate that sort of worldbuilding a whole lot more now, but all the little clues that it was actually scifi/science fantasy before that moment just totally flew over my head at the time. I do wish kid-me had had some better dragon books to read, though! I read a lot of them back then and most, unfortunately, were not very memorable. I can't even remember any titles besides some of the Pern ones.
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Nov 28, 2020 04:37
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Collateral posted:How to train your dragon. Seriously. Yeah I'm guessing they meant the stuff written by (overt or not) white supremacists and neo nazis and that sort of thing, more than works that just include violence. For an actual suggestion though: Beowulf if you haven't already read it. The recent Maria Headley translation is fun (if sometimes a little goofy) but there's always the more 'traditional' translations too.
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Dec 5, 2020 11:52
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Gnoman posted:On a somewhat different note, are there any good series involving the first steps of humanity beyond the Solar System? Most sci-fi universes involve aliens coming to us, or else are set long in the future. I'm looking for series that begin with "Earth's first FTL starship" or "the first extra-solar colony". It's a standalone and not a series, but I think Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson might kind of fit this.
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Dec 5, 2020 19:02
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John Lee posted:From the excerpts I have seen, it IS a quite good translation. Only reason I haven't taken the plunge is I'm irrationally annoyed by the reviews and press copy being like "This is a feminist version of Beowulf, and unlike other translations doesn't leave out that masculinity of the era was about exerting your will and maybe killing stuff, and maybe Grendel's mom was totally justified in being pissed that some guy killed her child?" I've read the whole thing (I haven't read other versions of Beowulf yet admittedly, but I'm pretty familiar with the overall story beats) and I was keeping an eye out for indications of it being "more femininist." I honestly couldn't tell you what makes it that different than most other translations probably are in that regard. Maybe there are subtleties of word/interpretation choice that flew over my head because I don't know old English and I'm not intimately familiar with the older translations, but regardless, nothing really stuck out to me as someone approaching it like "I want to finally read Beowulf and this version looks fun at least."
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Dec 6, 2020 13:45
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Walh Hara posted:That said, I did made me wonder: any other good epic fantasy books that are more about figuring out what happened rather than figuring out what will happen? Preferably not "evil that was defeated 1000 years ago comes back" because that's used too often. City of Stairs somewhat counts, perhaps there are others? I think the Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, etc.) by Jemisin kind of falls under this, at least in the later parts, but it's not part of the plot at the beginning (from what I remember at least - it's been a while since I read them).
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Dec 7, 2020 18:21
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It hasn't come out yet (it's supposed to soon), but The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum is at least in part about a future where "biotechnology has revolutionized gender" and exploring very different concepts of gender seems to be a big part of the story at least according to the marketing blurbs I've seen. I've had an eye on it since the pitch piques my interest, but I haven't read it yet since it's not out.
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Dec 15, 2020 02:23
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Leng posted:the hardcover is listed on Amazon.com.au for $2,386.99 Now that's a lot of dollarydoos! I actually bounced off of The Folding Knife a couple weeks ago after I hit about 20% and realized it just wasn't keeping my attention. I'm planning to give it another shot in the future though since I think I just wasn't in the mood at the time. And since Priory of the Orange Tree is on sale again, that reminds me that I also read through it recently. It's sort of stuck in my head because it somehow walked this fine line of being engaging enough that I finished it in barely over a week (despite the 850~ page length) but by the time I was done my thoughts were mostly just "well, that was fine." I know I've seen some people say it's sort of like a book that could have been a trilogy, but it was trimmed down to fit into a single (very long) book, and I think that makes sense with how some of the story beats felt almost too long and others felt really clipped. I'm still sort of baffled by the treatment of one of the main characters who, at least at the start, seems like she'd be more prominently featured (I assumed she'd probably show up about as much as her counterpart character). But she sort of just gets shuffled off to the side pretty quickly and only shows up whenever another terrible thing is about to happen to her. So, despite being pretty critical to the climax of the story, it felt like she had the least page-time of any of the main characters and I'd say was probably the least developed. I also wanted more dragons, I was expecting a lot more to happen with the dragons 
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Jan 1, 2021 03:51
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mewse posted:They put gideon the ninth in the stack but it was published sept 2019 I think they're counting the paperback as a sort of separate release.
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Jan 4, 2021 18:35
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wizzardstaff posted:ET is actually a pretty old dude who comes from a race of hardcore gardening enthusiasts, if I remember the official sequel novel correctly. I think it was written by Alan Dean Foster.  This sounds ridiculous so I had to look it up. Looks like it's by William Kotzwinkle and not Foster, but most of the rest of you recollection looks like it matches this review? https://www.the-new-englander.com/2020/11/04/e-t-and-the-book-of-the-green-planet-a-review/ I am extremely tempted to read this just because of how bizarre it sounds.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:56
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Oh wow, yeah that reminds me that I bought the trilogy in an ebook sale a few years back. I think I got maybe halfway into the first one and then got distracted and didn't finish it. I might have to go back to those soon because they were definitely weird as hell but in a way that I dig. The hodgepodge of various New Age woo and old-school occultism is dumb fun too if you know much about those sorts of things at all.
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Jan 15, 2021 22:57
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Strategic Tea posted:And as got pointed out, now it even seeps into mainstream marketing - Gideon being explicitly marketed as enemies to lovers, which I would be furious to have read beforehand even though it's fairly predictable I've seen people (is it actually somewhere in the official marketing? because lol if so) call Gideon that which I always thought was extremely bizarre. I never found the relationship development between Harrow and Gideon to be romantic really at all. Maybe you could make that argument for a totally different set of characters in Harrow the Ninth but even that seems a bit iffy to me given what you learn about Harrow's whole deal in that one. I dunno, maybe once Alecto comes out it'll prove my assumptions wrong and it was actually an extremely slow burn enemies-to-lovers the whole time (I doubt it though).
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Jan 18, 2021 14:00
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Piranesi is fantastic, but yeah, not the same as Jonathan Strange. Out of curiosity, has anyone else read Persephone Station by Stina Leicht? I had read a couple reviews that mentioned it slows down a lot in the middle and (now that I'm about 60% in) I'd say that is definitely the case. I'm also finding the worldbuilding/plot/characters interesting enough but the prose style is not my favorite. A lot of things feel sort of over-explained somehow, especially a lot of (what I would consider) fairly common scifi technology things, so kind of often I'm left thinking something like "I pretty much already know what a mechanized exoskeleton suit is, you don't need to tell me about it for a full page." I wonder if part of that is that I've just read/watched A LOT of scifi over the years so the explanations might be useful for someone who doesn't read a lot of scifi. But it really reminds me of that sort of older style of scifi where people would just egregiously infodump about how a wireless Martian telephone functions or whatever. (It's not super egregious in Persephone, to be clear, but it has a reminiscent flavor.)
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Jan 20, 2021 14:25
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Hungry Squirrel posted:I read this and the sequel yesterday after seeing it recommended here. Loved both. Can anyone suggest other books or authors that are similar? I think the Tensorate novellas by JY Yang are pretty similar thematically. (They go by Neon Yang now so you'll see their stuff published under both names.) Oh, also The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho.
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Jan 22, 2021 06:14
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I've had almost the opposite experience with some books where I've been distracted by honorifics that were translated. Specifically, I got thrown off by the use of Big'sis and Lil'sis in Aliette de Bodard's stuff at first (she writes a lot of Viet-inspired sci fi and fantasy). Especially since there are a lot of romances between women using the Aunt and -sis honorifics with each other, I had to keep reminding myself that they're not actually related. But I just wasn't very used to seeing those particular honorifics at first, and I've gotten used to it now. However, I know she's had to make twitter posts before explaining the honorifics and having to reassure people that she's not writing incest. Seems like it might just be one of those things where neither solution (translating or not) is going to be ideal.
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Jan 26, 2021 15:58
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Oh yeah I'd say there's a big difference between something that can be really culture/context specific like honorifics and just... general vocabulary. I've been a weeb since I was a kid so I've seen both ends of the over-localized/4kids-style approach and the pretentious fan-dub approach where you get the "*keikaku means plan" issues (and that screencap still makes me smile). And text is definitely different for sure - like Bodard writes in English so it's 100% her choice to use Big'sis and Younger Aunt as honorifics, not a translator making the decision. And then what a translator decides to do is a whole other thing, and I can't imagine how hard making some of those calls must be, especially for the things that don't translate 1:1 between languages.
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Jan 26, 2021 16:35
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I know I just recommended the Tensorate series recently but I definitely recommend picking this up for anyone who is into the whole "silkpunk"/xianxia-esque thing or just wants to read some good queer Southeast-Asian inspired fantasy. (It's even got dinosaurs!)
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Jan 28, 2021 04:35
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$3 is an absolute steal for the whole Xenogenesis trilogy. Definitely one of the first series that comes to mind for me when thinking of things where the aliens are actually appreciably alien.
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Feb 10, 2021 01:04
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Just finished Fireheart Tiger which is apparently just continuing to blow up the sales charts right now. It's short and fast-paced and a solid read. Sort of an amuse-bouche of a novella (novelette maybe? It's about 99 pages not counting acknowledgements and all that). Definitely worth checking out if princess/fire elemental lesbian love triangle with some light court intrigue is your thing. And speaking of gay court intrigue, Winter's Orbit was definitely something I'm glad I picked up. There's definitely still a noticeable lack of m/m romance/relationships in SFF, even if you just look at queer SFF (unless I've been looking in the wrong places) so it's great to see more being published that are also good reads. One thing that stuck out to me (in a way that's to the book's/author's credit) was how the past abuse that Jainan went through was reflected in his psychology. I would have loved a little more info relating to the worldbuilding (like with the clans and the Iskat court especially) but that's probably just me not being used to reading more romance-focused books.
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Feb 12, 2021 04:55
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tiniestacorn posted:Has anyone read Piranesi? I shotgunned it in one sitting and I was riding high, feeling like "drat this might be an all-timer" and then the cop showed up and the real world intruded in a boring way >:| and now I think it's merely good. I really enjoyed it I guess despite that part of the story (and a lot of other folks in this thread have liked it if you dive back a few months or so to around when it came out) but I can see how that plot development would change your feelings about it. My favorite parts were definitely the first half or so where it's just lush descriptions of the House with the small hints at the mystery. I actually got my mom a copy for Christmas after I read it (she really loved Johnathan Strange & Mr Norell too) and after she got a few pages in she asked me "so this is a lot of descriptions of statues and hallways - is this the whole book?" and I kinda wished it was.
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Feb 16, 2021 13:49
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